The backness of TRAP has been demonstrated to vary by speaker age and gender in many parts of the United States and Canada, including California (Kennedy & Grama 2012), Montreal (Kettig & Winter 2017), and Hawaiʻi (Drager et al. 2013). In each of these places, younger people and women lead in the ongoing retraction of TRAP from [æ] toward [a] (reduced F2). While work in California has indicated that TRAP-backing may be indexed with casual ‘Valley Girl’ and formal professional personae (D’Onofrio 2015), its social meanings in other locales remain little-investigated.
In this matched-guise experiment, L1 English speaking young adults from Montreal, Hawaiʻi, and California (1M, 1F per region) were recorded reading a sentence; vowel resynthesis in the word map produced a retracted and an unretracted guise from the same recording from each speaker, differing by 200 Hz in F2. Forty-six young adult L1 English participants in Montreal (11 male) completed a task rating speakers’ physical and social attributes.
Bayesian linear hierarchical modeling indicates that female listeners judge retracted stimuli as more authoritative in women’s voices, while men judge male speakers’ unretracted guises as more authoritative. Overall, female unretracted and male retracted guises are rated as friendlier. Female listeners identify retracted male, but not female, guises as younger-sounding.
While men’s shiftedness may be judged as reliably indicating age, women associate TRAP-backing with authoritative, less-friendly characteristics in other women. In the course of a female-led sound shift, speakers – especially women – may be more attuned to women’s style shifting, and may diverge from men in their social evaluations.
References:
D’Onofrio, A. 2015. Perceiving personae: Effects of social information on perceptions of TRAP-backing. UPenn Working Papers in Linguistics 21(2):31–39.
Drager, K, M. J. Kirtley, J. Grama & S. Simpson. 2013. Language variation and change in Hawaiʻi English: KIT, DRESS, and TRAP. UPenn Working Papers in Linguistics 19(2):41–50.
Kennedy, R & J. Grama. 2012. Chain shifting and centralization in California vowels: An acoustic analysis. American Speech 87(1):39–56.
Kettig, T. & B. Winter. 2017. Producing and perceiving the Canadian Vowel Shift: Evidence from a Montreal community. Language Variation & Change 29:79–100.
